Note: once you've imported the public key, you can delete it from the server.

and finally set file permissions on the server:

$ chmod 700 ~/.ssh$ chmod 600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

The above permissions are required if StrictModes is set to yes in /etc/ssh/sshd_config (the default).

Ensure the correct SELinux contexts are set:

$ restorecon -Rv ~/.ssh Now when you login to the server you won't be prompted for a password (unless you entered a passphrase when you created your key pair). By default, ssh will first try to authenticate using keys. If no keys are found or authentication fails, then ssh will fall back to conventional password authentication.

Once you've checked you can successfully login to the server using your public/private key pair, you can disable password authentication completely by adding the following setting to your /etc/ssh/sshd_config file: